Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 149

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 149
Each day of training grew more difficult, and managing the wagers became correspondingly more delicate.
As the seasons shifted several times over, I realized that even by modern standards, I had come of age.
‘They must have grown quite a bit too.’
I sipped warm medicinal wine and read the letters my younger siblings had sent.
The marten, rabbit, and wolf fur scarves had each gone to their respective owners, and it seemed everyone was using them well.
And as expected, both Cheonwoo and Sama Hyeon left arrogant replies saying they didn’t know what kind of person this Yeo Ha-ryun fellow was, but they wanted to test for themselves whether he had the right to say such things.
I thought Cheonwoo might say such things due to competitive spirit from training at the Mudang Sect, but Sama Hyeon was unexpected.
‘I thought he was the rational type. Seems his blood boils in strange places.’
Wouldn’t he make a fine friend, even if not a younger brother?
What I was making was a white tiger fur cloak.
In modern terms, it was something like a cape—worn over clothes to ward off the cold.
Cheonwoo had brought it back.
He had subjugated a white tiger on the mountain that had been preying on commoners.
I can’t describe how shocked I was when the bounty hunter brought it in.
He said he hoped his older brother would wear what remained, but there would be far too much leather left over.
I used Windcloud Qi and Void Grasping to reinforce the needle.
‘If I’m not careful, this will snap.’
Even deer leather was impossibly tough to push a needle through.
Normally I should use special needles, but if I did that, the training would lose all meaning, so I had to handle everything with ordinary quilting needles.
‘If I mix in fire qi, will the leather be damaged?’
Eventually, I began handling everything from cutting to processing myself.
* * *
Time passed once more.
“Hee. That game you invented recently—the patients at the Medical Hall have been responding well to it.”
“Is that so?”
Clack—
Jegalling and I sat facing each other across a square Go board.
Jegalling held the white stones while I held the black stones.
Of course, “holding” was purely metaphorical in terms of inner qi, not physical.
When I first agreed to play Go with my Master, I expected to be utterly crushed. But once we actually started, it proved surprisingly manageable.
What began with three handicap stones has now progressed to just two.
My inner qi control and situational judgment had begun growing rapidly.
Clack—
‘At first, even placing a stone where I wanted was difficult.’
Perhaps it was the blood of Korea, a nation obsessed with games.
This suited my nature far better than simply distinguishing between black and white stones.
My Master also seemed to enjoy playing Go with his disciple.
“It’s called blue jade.”
“Ah, I see.”
Qingyu—a board game adapted from modern Monopoly to suit the circumstances of Gangho.
“I created it so patients would stay still in their beds, and it seems to be getting a good response.”
“So it turned out that way.”
If modern Monopoly is a game about buying land, constructing buildings, and earning money, then Qingyu is one where you earn money by establishing branches of Buntta or secular martial arts schools in Gangho.
It’s the same concept, but instead of uninhabited islands, there’s the Neuro Cave and abandoned monastery training grounds.
Martial artists don’t listen to their families, so they certainly won’t listen to a doctor.
Unless they were too injured to even get out of bed, they would inevitably discharge themselves and rush off to drink.
Many patients who appear fine on the surface still need their conditions monitored, so it’s not easy to keep them in the ward without drinking or wielding blades.
That’s why I created Qingyu—Gangho’s Monopoly.
In an era where gambling, drinking, and Go were the typical pastimes for adults, the emergence of a new form of entertainment created a sensation.
Though similar games existed in this era, they lacked the systematic balance of modern board games worn smooth by time, and the element of the golden key card—a game of chance—ignited the hearts of martial artists.
Here, instead of the golden key card, it’s called the “Opportunity Tile.”
An eighty-year-old sect master who swore he’d repay the grudge of having his belly stabbed by evil sect members learned Qingyu once and spent an entire week hospitalized in perfect peace.
Whether he settled his grudges after leaving or not was his concern, but for the Medical Hall’s current situation requiring absolute rest, Qingyu was a lifesaver.
“Many trading guilds want to purchase Qingyu.”
“I thought they’d just copy it themselves.”
In an era without intellectual property rights, I assumed anyone would simply imitate and distribute it.
My Master answered.
“That’s true, but… merchants also need to visit the Medical Hall when they’re sick. And several sect masters said they absolutely wanted to experience that feeling again.”
Hmm, it seems everyone wants to play another round.
Click—
I never expected a board game to be this popular.
‘Since it’s come to this, should I release something like Halchal in Gangho too?’
It might help with martial arts training… or it might not.
Either way, someone’s definitely going to get injured.
‘Hmm. I’ll release that later.’
No need to invite unnecessary bloodshed.
My Master made the next move.
Click—
“And there’s also a trading guild that wants to purchase ondol heating systems.”
“Ondol?”
“Martial artists who experienced ondol at the Medical Hall wanted to install it in their own homes. If anything, this movement is overdue.”
“I wish soap had spread this widely.”
Click—
“Haha, don’t be so impatient.”
The soap I’d most wanted to promote was getting a lukewarm response, and I never imagined ondol and board games would spread first.
‘Right. Hand washing can be inconvenient, I suppose.’
Even on Earth, teaching children to wash their hands was incredibly difficult.
Here, the target wasn’t even children—it was adults.
Jin Cheon-hee’s soap distribution business thus met a glorious demise.
Fortunately, the venture was funded entirely from my own pocket money, and I managed to survive thanks to purchases from the Medical Hall Buntta and the Uibang.
Still, the financial loss stung deeply enough that I shed tears when no one was watching.
‘Ugh, there’s no helping it. If things have come to this, I’ll just have to sell Cheongok and Ondol.’
I said this to myself.
“I’ll do it. Which trading guilds were interested?”
“Mm. There are quite a few. I’ll have Yoo Ho compile the list and send it to you. Now that I think about it, the list includes the Bota Trading Guild under the Bota Trade Bureau and the Namgung Trading Guild as well.”
My brow furrowed.
“The places that also sell soap…”
“Hehehehe, Hee. Isn’t your immediate future more important than such things?”
Translating my Master’s words, it meant: ‘Give up on what won’t sell anyway, and just make up for the losses.’
I clutched my aching chest.
* * *
Time passed once more.
I spent my days in constant busyness.
Surgical operations and their instruction, along with continued medical studies.
In particular, I wanted to create a new antibiotic, and that alone was a race against time.
Streptomycin.
This substance, effective against tuberculosis called the “white plague,” is one of the representative antibiotics extracted from soil.
Dr. Selman Abraham Waksman and his students, noting how tuberculosis was rapidly destroyed in soil, discovered it after studying ten thousand soil microorganism cultures.
Through research, they learned that streptomycin among them was helpful, but since the strain had already been used in experiments, they had to cultivate it from scratch again.
Thus, after grueling labor, he won the Nobel Prize.
Such experiments require trying random approaches based on a single hypothesis and discarding them until reaching the desired result.
Fortunately, I already knew that for streptomycin, I needed to extract something called streptomyces griseus, which belongs to the order Actinomycetales.
I also knew what this organism looked like and how it functioned.
Furthermore, I had studied how to adjust acidity during cultivation, how to use charcoal if necessary, that temperatures around 35 degrees Celsius were ideal, and various other necessary factors.
The only problem was the low efficiency, resulting in losses exceeding 50%.
According to recent papers, there existed a method to increase cultivation efficiency by using small amounts of penicillin.
But knowing and doing are entirely different matters.
I needed the hellish labor of actinomycete cultivation and separation experiments.
‘Roughly about ten thousand petri dishes or so…?’
Extracting streptomycin would require different efforts than penicillin.
‘Moreover, since the penicillin here works slightly differently than that world’s version, something might differ this time as well.’
This work, which occasionally goes wrong even with modern scientific technology, had to be accomplished in the Martial Arts World through devotion to petri dishes.
In that process, I ground down both myself and Yoo Ho.
I was not lonely.
Yoo Ho was an excellent lab assistant.
Since there were no doctoral degrees in this era, Yoo Ho had no reason to flee.
And I had one last shred of conscience.
The microscope.
I was pushing forward in developing a primitive microscope, grinding Yoo Ho down in the process.
It’s a Leeuwenhoek microscope made around 1600.
Back then, the key was how small one could make the glass sphere. The smaller the glass sphere, the higher the magnification.
I didn’t stop grinding Yoo Ho until I’d made the smallest sphere possible.
Yoo Ho shouted, “Drop dead, you brat!”
I found myself quite fond of him for it.
If someone asked whether the brown ox or the black ox worked harder, I could confidently say Yoo Ho was the most capable.
Despite being a primitive form of microscope, it boasted enough magnification to observe red blood cells.
It falls slightly short for observing actinomycetes. But with our current technological capabilities, this is the limit we’ve pushed to with every ounce of effort.
From here on, I plan to supplement it by either utilizing inner energy or improving the lenses.
‘Remarkable, that Yoo Ho is.’
For reasons he’d never reveal even if his mouth were torn apart, Yoo Ho’s ability to manipulate fire far exceeded what any human should be capable of—and he wielded it with remarkable skill.
Even I found it astonishing how such a thing was possible.
“The unit cost will rise considerably, Young Master. Distribution will be impossible as well.”
Mass production would inevitably require factory operations. Yet no matter how capable Yoo Ho was, lens processing had its time constraints and limits.
“Making one will be the end of it.”
“That’s fine. Even if only one is completed, I’ll be more than satisfied.”
Yoo Ho could fashion nearly anything if he understood its principles and structure.
Of course, he couldn’t make items requiring petrochemical refining like plastic, but he could certainly craft things from glass, iron, and wood.
‘It’s enough to make ghosts weep—but that’s alright. Yoo Ho, my personal slave.’
I gazed at Yoo Ho with the satisfaction of a building owner holding a billion won in his chest.
I felt proud.
And Yoo Ho vented his exhaustion by improving the wooden puppets. Those improved puppets then mercilessly beat me when my dice roll went awry.
Beatings under the guise of acupoint training and external energy cultivation!
Thwack, thwack-thwack-thwack!
“Ugh, aaagh! Ack! That bastard Yoo Ho really… Kgh!”
The brutal beatings continued night after night.
It was a mad relationship.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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